A group of students competing in the PennApps Data Hackathon created a microwave which plays a popular YouTube video that is the length of the time you’ve entered for your food to heat up. They call it the μWave and their hack won them first prize in the competition. Not only does the microwave entertain you while your left over chicken fried rice is reheating, but it also texts you when your food is done and tweets about when you use it. They used an Arduino to read the amount of time on the microwave’s 7-segment display and to communicate that information to a web server with Ruby on Rails. I’m guessing that the next logical step is to integrate Facebook so that the user must friend the microwave before using it. [via Hack A Day]
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